Wikipedia Editor Faces Consequences

One of my favorite short pieces of writing is Douglas Adams' pedantic history of the world, a chronology that notes the start of the new millenium. He must have been sorely disappointed when the events of Jan. 1, 2001, did not transpire as expected.

I am a pedant. I once alarmed my relatives in the middle of the night by rearranging their collection of leather-bound Franklin Library Pulitzer Prize classics in the order they won the prize. My brother-in-law, who must also be a pedant, immediately noticed the next morning that the books were no longer in alphabetical order by author's last name. In the ensuing disagreement, a pedantic time was had by all. (Wikipedia, to its enduring shame, lists winners in reverse chronological order.)

As a pedant, I've tried to resist getting sucked into Wikipedia's internal politics, because I know I'll have such a great time I'll completely lose interest in the outside world.

Wikipedia has developed a labyrynthine internal bureaucracy at Internet speed. It's so compelling that some of the most active contributors to the site don't work on encyclopedia entries at all, contributing instead to the endless debates about the production of encyclopedia entries. Masters of the form take it a level deeper, debating the policies that govern these debates.

Bureaucracy's engrained so deep in Wikipedia that there's an official job called Bureaucrat. Twenty-three people have attained this level, a heady rush that must be similar to how I felt when my magic-user reached 22,501 experience points and became a Thaumaturgist before he was eaten by a bulette.

I broke down and posted around a dozen comments yesterday within Wikipedia about Ryan "Essjay" Jordan, the fake tenured professor of theology experiencing a come to Jesus moment after rising to Wikipedia's leadership. He's been pimping his bogus academic credentials since the first edits he made on the site and was promoted by founder Jimmy Wales after admitting the ruse. As a member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, Jordan will judge whether site contributors should be banned for inappropriate or unethical behavior.

If there's any accountability at all within Wikipedia, there's no way this guy should remain in a position of authority. Wikipedia has huge potential for misuse, as any number of biographical subjects can attest, and it depends entirely on the notion that its editorial process can be trusted to produce an authoritative reference work read by millions of people.

As it turns out, I might get my wish that someone be held accountable over this incident. A Wikipedia administrator with 40,000 edits has suggested that I lose editing privileges.

For the past 48 hours, Rcade has made absolutely no contributions to the project except to this discussion. ... There are limits to discussing this subject, and Rcade needs to be introduced to these limits and now.

When I told this to my wife, she was completely in favor of my ouster. I'm glad she doesn't have an account on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia · Pedantry · 2007/03/02 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia Admin Loses His Religion

Seth Finkelstein covers the latest scandal to embarrass Wikipedia: a site administrator and Wikia employee who's been lying for years about his academic credentials.

Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old in Kentucky who's never taught a class, claimed on his Wikipedia bio and in an interview with the New Yorker to be a tenured professor of religion with four degrees: a bachelor of arts in religious studies, master of arts in religion, doctorate of philosophy in theology and doctorate in canon law. The magazine ran a correction after he bragged on his Wikipedia talk page about fooling reporter Stacy Schiff and the magazine's fact checker:

I did six hours of interviews with the reporter, and two with a fact checker, but I was really surprised that they were willing to do an interview with someone who they couldn't confirm; I can only assume that it is proof I was doing a good job playing the part.

Jordan serves on one of Wikipedia's management committees and was hired in January by Wikia, the for-profit company affiliated with the site, after acknowledging the fraud. If Jordan can be believed, he told Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about faking his bio before being hired:

Before I accepted the position, I provided all my real details to Angela and Jimbo, and immediately provided the same information to Brad Patrick; I also placed it on my Wikia userpage, from where I expected it would fairly quickly make it's way back to Wikipedia.

Reporters who cover Wikipedia should consider its role in this deception. Someone at Wikipedia recommended Jordan to Schiff as an interview subject, Wales hired him after he admitted the ruse and nobody told the New Yorker it had been scammed. When contacted by the magazine, Wales said, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."

In a furious debate going on within Wikipedia, one of Jordan's fans makes a defense of his actions that nicely demonstrates what a trainwreck the project has become under the situational ethics of its management:

... 2. If you believe what people say on the internet, you are stupid. 3. There is no honesty policy on wikipedia, and people have a right to protect themselves. ... 5. If the New Yorker is stupid enough to believe everything everyone tells them, that's their problem.

Update:

A member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Erik Möller, is urging Ryan Jordan to step down:

Creating a pseudonym is one thing. Creating an elaborate fake persona with fake credentials, and using it in arguments, letters, and interviews is another. I am deeply troubled by this behavior, consider it highly unethical, and would like to ask you to seriously consider stepping down from your official Wikimedia roles. At the very least, I believe you owe the community an apology for this behavior. You have damaged both the reputation of the project, and your own. I am deeply saddened and disappointed.

Möeller was elected to the board in September 2006 to assume a term that ends in December 2007.

Wikipedia · Journalism · 2007/03/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money

A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money.

Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them.

"Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon.

There's money being made in blogging beyond the big names. I run four blogs that aren't anywhere close to the top 100 -- ranking on Technorati from 4,000 to 10,000 -- and they've become a decent part-time job. (I could double the income overnight if I wasn't rejecting all text-link ad offers.) Randy Charles Morin recently turned his KBCafe blog network into a full-time gig because of the revenue it's earning.

Take a look at the rate card for the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the group that kicked my ass to the curb in 2005. Even in a slow period before the presidential election ramps up, the 20th most popular blog in that network is making $500 this week in ad revenue.

Aaron Brazell recently put his TechnoSailor blog up for auction on SitePoint Marketplace, a place where web publishers can sell established web sites.

TechnoSailor has decent-but-not great numbers -- a Technorati ranking of 2,300, Google page rank of 6 and monthly income of $250 -- yet the auction sold for $23,750. The deal subsequently fell through when they couldn't reach terms on a contract, but it's comparable to what buyers are paying for other sites in the same marketplace.

A business reporter who thinks there's no money in blogging should talk to people like Morin, BlogAds founder Henry Copeland and the publisher of SitePoint. As blogging matures and some publishers look to get out, the ones who sell out are going to be pleasantly surprised at what their sites are worth.

Blogging · Business · 2007/02/26 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Eric Meyer: 'Diversity is Not of Itself Important'

I was disappointed to read this morning that Eric Meyer, organizer of the An Event Apart series of conferences, doesn't think it's important to take proactive steps to recruit more female speakers at tech events:

In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it. That's always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

You'll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference.

The fact that he's addressing the issue at all is a step in the right direction, since conference organizers are starting to realize they risk a public flogging when their speaking roster's a men's club. I wrote last year about the Spring Experience, a Java event organized by NoFluffJustStuff that was 0-for-38. Jason Kottke plays the same numbers game on his blog and finds more 0-fers.

Whenever someone in Meyer's position claims that he's running a meritocracy, I check the bios of the speakers at his event and find reasons to doubt it.

An Event Apart Seattle in June has nine announced speakers, all male. Though a couple names are so big you'd have trouble finding replacements of equal stature and marketability, the total absence of women says more about his recruitment process than the pool of potential speakers.

I spent an hour looking into the companies and projects associated with his speakers and found 10 women well-qualified to appear:

• Rachel Andrew, the author of 11 books on CSS and web publishing and a steering committee member of the Web Standards Project
• Kimberly Blessing, colead of the Web Standards Project and the manager of PayPal's web development platform
• Elizabeth Castro, author of the HTML, XHTML, and CSS and XML for the World Wide Web books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series
• Heather Powazek Champ, founder of JPG Magazine, Flickr community manager and recipient of a Bloggies lifetime achievement award
• Janice Fraser, cofounder of Adaptive Path, interaction design teacher at San Francisco State University and frequent speaker on user experience
• Kelly Goto, founder of the strategic design firm Gotomedia, author of Web Redesign: Workflow that Works and a speaker at SVEF
• Molly Holzschlag, author of 30 books on CSS and web design, Web Standards Project steering committee member and an invited expert for the World Wide Web Consortium HTML and GEO working groups
• Laura Lemay, million-selling author of the Teach Yourself books on HTML, XHTML and Java
• Dori Smith, Web Standards Project steering committee member, author of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickStart Guide and a frequent conference speaker
• Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the CSS-promoting International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, Santa Clara University School of Law lecturer and frequent speaker on accessibility

A couple of people I knew already, but most were found simply by browsing the bios of Meyer's chosen speakers. He could've found these people by asking his own invitees. On Shelley Powers' blog, Meyer made this comment in defense of his position:

... if it's a marketing failure, the conference will fail, crater my bank account, and endanger my ability to feed my wife and daughter.

If his daughter follows his footsteps and runs into the stupid self-perpetuating belief that women interested in tech are outside the norm, I wonder if he'll still find the issue completely unimportant.

Diversity · Css · Web Design · 2007/02/24 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Eliot Spitzer Files UDRP to Take EliotSpitzer.Com

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appears to have begun legal proceedings to take the domain names eliotspitzer.com and eliotspitzer.org away from Eric Keller, a New Jersey online candy retailer who registered them in 2001.

A Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) arbitration began today regarding the domains at the National Arbitration Forum. Arbitrators will decide whether the domains were registered and used in bad faith, whether Keller has legitimate rights in the names, and whether Spitzer has used his name as a trademark in commerce. He must prevail on all three to take the domains.

The domains are parked today, but archived web pages from the Internet Wayback Machine indicate that eliotspitzer.com was used for several years to direct traffic to eBulkCandy.com LLC, a candy retailer based in Trenton, N.J.

eBulkCandy, which also operates stores at JordanAlmonds.Com and HometownCandy.Com, has been the subject of numerous consumer complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the complaint site Rip Off Report.

On Dec. 5, Keller was indicted by the Department of Justice on 10 counts of mail fraud for allegedly bilking UPS out of charges for candy shipments:

From September 22, 2001 through February 2005, Keller created a series of bogus UPS shipping accounts for the purpose of shipping candy to ebulkcandy customers, and failed to pay UPS for the shipping. The indictment alleges that at the time Keller opened the UPS accounts, he had no intention of paying UPS for shipping services. According to the charges, defendant Eric Keller defrauded UPS of approximately $154,581.

He faces up to 200 years imprisonment and a $2.5 million fine.

In 2003, Keller was sued in Illinois by Brach's Confections for cybersquatting and trademark infringement over nine domains that incorporated Brach's into their names: brach.us, brachcandy.com, brachs.net, brachs.org, brachscandies.com, brachscandy.net, brachsconfections.com, brachsoutlet.com and brachswholesale.com.

One filing related to the suit alleged that Keller dodged a process server:

... Keller repeatedly tried to avoid service, ranging from refusing mail service to refusing to accept service through a car window when confronted by a process server. In the last instance, the process server left the two sets of summons and complaint for Keller ... by the car containing the defendant on May 16, 2003. When the process server returned a short while later both Keller and the summonses and complaints had left the side of the car.

Udrp · Politics · Domains · 2007/02/22 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Fuzzy Zoeller Sues Over Libelous Wikipedia Page

Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller has sued a Florida company for libel over edits made to his Wikipedia entry from one of the company's computers.

Although I reported one of Wikipedia's best-known gaffes -- project founder Jimmy Wales edited his own page to remove credit from a former colleague -- I'm a defender of the project. I think it's an amazing experiment in collective fact-gathering that deserves to be nurtured, no matter how many different ways Seth Finkelstein proves it should've been smothered in infancy.

Wikipedia's response to the Zoeller suit has become another one of those gaffes.

Wales often touts Wikipedia's transparency as a virtue because the site maintains a public edit history of changes made to each page. Last September, in a game of mine's bigger between Wales and Encyclopedia Britannica Editor-in-Chief Dale Hoiberg in the Wall Street Journal, Wales made this observation:

Britannica doesn't display its rough drafts, or the articles before being checked by a copy editor; Wikipedia does. We think this sort of open transparency is healthy and results in greater quality than doing everything behind closed doors.

In response to Zoeller's suit, Wikipedia has removed all edits he claims are libelous from the history of the page. No one can go back and review the drafts that are central to the suit.

The following paragraphs, which are still in the Answers.Com mirror of Wikipedia, are the material that sent Zoeller's lawyers into attack mode:

Zoeller went public with his alcoholism and prescription drug addiction, explaining that at the time he made those statements, he was "in the process of polishing off a fifth of Jack (Daniels) after popping a handful of vicodin pills". He further detailed the violent nature of his disease, recalling how he'd viciously beat his wife Dianne and their four children while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. He also admitted feigning a ruptured spinal disc in 1985 so as to be prescribed a multitude of prescription medication. [4]

He sought professional help and mended his fractured familial relationships. In May 2006, Zoeller said in an interview with Golf Digest magazine that he hadn't beaten his wife in nearly five years.

The lawsuit, which Zoeller filed as "John Doe," called these paragraphs reckless, false and defamatory and asked for $15,000 in damages. For 13 days, Wikipedia said he was a drunken pill-popping wife and child batterer.

Zoeller's target may be easily found, since the person's edits reveal an '80s hair metal aficionado who can't be hard to ID at a small company.

It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's only as good as the ability to identify and punish encyclopedic wrongdoers. One dirty Ratt fan might have ended the era in which anonymous cranks could edit the 12th most popular site on the web.

Wikipedia · Libel · Sports · 2007/02/22 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Was the First Blog a .Plan File?

The 10th birthday of Scripting News April 1 is likely to usher in a bunch of "blogging turns 10" press coverage, since Dave Winer hasn't been shy about staking his claim as an originator of the medium.

Though he didn't call the site a weblog until February 1999, Scripting News employed a link-heavy, short take, reverse chronological style adopted by hundreds of web publishers, especially after UserLand Software began free hosting on EditThisPage.Com later that year.

The first blog I recognized as a different kind of web site was Harold Stusnick's Offhand Remarks. When Stusnick began his blog in September 1997, he credited Winer and Michael Sippey.

While doing some research on the finger protocol for a networking project in Sams' Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, I found a site that ought to be mentioned among the earliest blogs: Blues News.

Blues News sprang from the PC game programming community, which had a lot of coders spreading news via .plan files read over finger in the mid-'90s. The first posts from the site, which date back to July 1996, follow all of the characteristics of an early blog.

I've never thought of finger as a precursor to blogging, but .plan files share several things in common with early blogs: reverse order, tech-heavy content and an emphasis on personal activities.

For my book, I had trouble finding anyone who's still updating their .plan file. The last active person in the fingosphere may be Id Software programmer Timothee Besset, who posted on Feb. 2 about a new release of Doom 3.

Blogging · Finger · 2007/02/22 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

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